The news is out: things ain’t getting better, which means America’s phony media will have to start digging up more excuses for the Democrats’ failed economic policies. Alana Semuels, Harvard graduate and a ‘reporter” for the Los Angeles Times has come up with a real old chestnut: technological unemployment. (She gets an A for effort and an F minus for lack of imagination.)

While a number of commentators thought it likely that the mining boom would force Glenn Stevens, governor of the Reserve Bank of Australian, to raise interest rates I took the opposite view. So far I have been proved right. I reasoned that one would have to be an idiot to focus entirely on the mining boom at the expense of other factors. And Glenn Stevens is no idiot, even though his economic reasoning is deeply flawed.

Now that Keynesianism is being promoted with renewed enthusiasm (clear evidence that economic fallacies never really die) we should take a look at Keynes’ dangerous fallacies and errors. Some years ago Alex Millmow, a Keynesian and senior lecturer in economics at Charles Sturt University at the time, wrote enthusiastically in the Australian Financial Review of Geoff Harcourt and Peter Riach’s commissioning of a two-volume set written by Keynesians that was intended as a ‘rewrite’ of Keynes’ General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. According to Millmow, this work would put an end to arguments about “what Keynes really meant”. Well the works were published and, as expected, they did not put an end to “what Keynes really meant”.

Following the view of Irving Fisher some economists argue that deflation and the following depression is the result of over indebtedness. Fisher regarded over-indebtedness as a situation where the debt is out of line i.e. too big relatively to other economic factors. He held that

Time Magazine ran an article on U.S.-Cuba relations which employs the word embargo (as in big, bad bully U.S. against innocent little free-health-care provider Castro) eight times. The term travel ban figures in the article’s very title.

The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism establishes the strong link between Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement and the roots of modern Islamic jihadists. Morse plumbs the ideology of al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a key Nazi collaborator, and shows how Nazi teachings infected Arab politics in the 20th century — and guide radical Islam today.

In a news report on October 2nd, 2010, titled Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts , New York Times reporter Kate Zernike tells us that books like Frederick Bastiat’s The Law, from 1850, and F. A Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom from 1944, are selling like hotcakes among Tea Party members.

In trying to explain the state of the American economy the commentariat is still blaming the lack of consumer demand. But as the classical economists always pointed out when presented with this fallacy, consumption is never a problem but production is.

The mining boom is making it very clear that the Reserve Bank and our commentariat are unlikely to ever grasp the relationship between inflation and wages. Whenever it appears that wages are rising ‘too’ fast and that a shortage of skilled labour is emerging we are invariably warned that the RBA could be forced to raise interest rates to counter the inflationary effects of wages increases. This is nonsense. The view that rising wages in themselves can have an inflationary impact seems to have its roots in the discredited cost-of-production theory of prices.

Some economic pundits are warning — again — that deflation poses a severe threat to the US economy, despite the fact that Bernanke is desperately trying to create an inflationary-driven recovery. Now back in November 2001 the same siren voices were singing the same seductive tune, even though the Fed was rapidly expanding the money supply.

Dr Steven Kates rightly took issue with the Labor Government’s spending policy to counter the recession. This was too much for James Guest, who piously calls himself a “dry” (a self-styled “economic rationalist” who, to my knowledge, has contributed absolutely nothing to the advancement of the free market).

Now that the fanatical green Senator Senator Bob Brown is in a position to influence government decision-making perhaps we should take another look at the greens’ hatred of the humble car and ask ourselves why this boon causes social engineers, would-planners and environmentalist fanatics such anguish? After all, the car has been a great liberator for the masses, giving them the kind of freedom that was once the exclusive preserve of the wealthier classes.

With the holidays quickly approaching, family traditions start to fill our calendars. Trips to the mall to deliver gift lists to Santa, digging decorations out of the basement and planning the family dinner are all about to become top priorities. For my family, nothing matches our tradition of the annual viewing of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

The oldest gay-rights organization in Latin America is taking Fidel Castro to the International Court of justice in The Hague for “crimes against humanity.” “What?!” snort the “enlightened.” You rubes got the news exactly bass-ackwards!

The Labor Government’s contemptuous attitude towards the property rights of farmers and miners should surprise no one given its readiness to collaborate with the malevolent greens whose pathological hatred of economic growth would have been fully exposed years ago if our rightwing had have had the gumption and the imagination to confront them directly. Now we are all going to pay a price.

As soon as Obama threw his hat into the presidential arena I warned that if he were to win the consequences for the US economy would be very grave. Time — and a very short time at that — has borne out this prediction. Rather than stimulate the economy I warned that his policies would — if not reversed — lead to economic stagnation. At best a situation where the rate of capital accumulation barely keeps abreast of population growth thereby preventing a significant rise in real wages. This, I argued, would be due to the massive increase in government misdirecting resources to consumption.

Despite the massive fiscal stimulus package of nearly $800 billion approved by the Congress early last year, and trillions of dollars pumped by the Fed, the rally in various key economic data seems to be coming to an end. After falling to 32.5 in December 2008 the ISM manufacturing index peaked at 60.4 in April this year. In August the index stood at 56.3. Also the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at 9.6per cent with almost 15 million Americans out of work.

One could not be blamed for concluding that Glenn Stevens is an excellent reason why the Reserve Bank of Australia should be abolished. Like all the bank’s bureaucrats (the Australian Treasury is every bit as bad) he has no genuine grasp of monetary theory and is utterly ignorant of the vital importance of capital theory. To be fair, Australia’s economic commentariat are not any better. And that includes the denizens of our so-called think tanks, particularly those who think insults and smart-aleck comments are preferable to a genuine economic debate.

For sometime I have been warning that the Australian economy is far from healthy. Now the Bureau of Statistics reported early this month that the economy expanded by 1.2 per cent in the June quarter with household spending jumping by 1.6 per cent and personal saving falling from 3.4 per cent to 1.5 per cent. Naturally, this led members of the economic commentariat to announce a strengthening in consumer confidence which in turn will encourage further growth.

Despite outlandish propaganda by socialists entrepreneurs succeed in a free market by not only producing better and cheaper goods but lower-priced higher quality goods as well as producing entirely new goods. Those entrepreneurs who fail the consumer test fall by the wayside while those who succeed in satisfying consumer wants go on to even greater success. But when government intervention expands genuine entrepreneurs are squeezed out in favour of predatory hustlers whose skills are not found in producing for the market place but in lobbying politicians for privileges that result in the exploitation of the public.